Update: $1M bill for taxpayers to clean up, Bismarck Tribune.
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The Associated Press reported approximately 150 of the protesters were seen marching down a road Wednesday. It wasn’t clear where they were going.
I remember a cartoon where a line of marchers were tramping along singing "Don't know where we're going but we're going..."
Thousands of people who set up camp in August to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline because of the environmental threat they said it posed to the area’s water supply didn’t leave their campsite cleaner than they found it.
Gov. Doug Burgum (R) told KFGO the DAPL protesters left behind tons of garbage that will have to be cleaned up before the annual snowmelt. He compared the camp where tents had been set up and wooden structures built to something between a landfill and a junkyard.
“This is probably the biggest ecological mess on the entire Missouri River system from top to bottom in this country,” Burgum said.
The Associated Press reported that local and federal officials think there could be enough trash and garbage left behind by the protesters to fill 2,500 pickup trucks.
“Months of accumulated debris, including human waste…pose a significant and increasing environmental threat to the waters of the Missouri River if cleanup and removal efforts are not quickly accelerated and completed before flooding begin,” he added in the executive order.
Morton County Emergency Manager Tom Doering told AP there was more garbage at the protest site than anybody had expected.
“We’re really fighting the clock,” he said.
Thousands of protesters had occupied the campground on federal land between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation and the construction site of DAPL since August 2016.
Protesters who were willing to leave peacefully were driven to Bismarck, N.D., and given bus tickets to go home.
“Right now there is a forced removal happening, an ethnic cleansing,” protester Chase Iron Eyes told CBS News. Iron Eyes, who had lived at the protest site through a North Dakota winter, said he was only leaving to avoid being arrested.
Others said they would allow themselves to be “ceremonially arrested.”
The Associated Press reported approximately 150 of the protesters were seen marching down a road Wednesday. It wasn’t clear where they were going.
NBC News reported that the protesters burned their tents at the demonstration site “for cultural reasons” Wednesday, the deadline for leaving the campground. Wooden housing structures the protesters had built were also burned.
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